The NAACP Has Called for a Moratorium on Expanding Charter Schools

Charter schools have failed to live up to their hype, as school segregation continues to grow across America.

August 24, 2017

President Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos pose for photographs at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster clubhouse in New Jersey. (AP / Carolyn Kaster)

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The crude and cruel epithets dribbling from the Oval Office these days are a jarring reflection of the Trump administration’s relentless hostility to civil rights. But it may be that the president’s most pernicious attacks on communities of color isn’t happening in the West Wing but unfolding day-to-day in our children’s classrooms. Under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, charter schools are set to dramatically expand as a vehicle for Trump’s agenda of resegregating and privatizing public education. But charters are also becoming a site of resistance to the administration’s effort to unleash forces of the free market to dismantle educational rights.

In a climate of roiling racial polarization, the NAACP has called for a moratorium on the expansion of charter schools. It’s not just to oppose Trump’s influence. It’s a bottom-up revolt against years of corporatization of public education.

The NAACP’s recent resolution and Plan of Action on charter schools challenges the market-driven framework of mainstream education reform. The group criticizes charters—public institutions managed by corporations with minimal regulation—as both unethical and socially damaging. A new report, drawn from public hearings conducted nationwide, affirmed an overall shift among liberals away from support of charters and similar pro-privatization school reforms. Civil-rights groups, teachers’ unions, and parents have warned that further expanding the charter sector would fuel institutionalized segregation, particularly under Trump’s shadow: The administration’s drive to commercialize K12 education threatens to deepen the private sector’s reach into under-resourced school districts.

The question of who controls schools, and for whose benefit, is at the core of the debate. “[C]harter schools with privately appointed boards do not represent the public yet make decisions about how public funds are spent,” the group argues. And even when charters do offer quality educational services, increasingly scarce resources for quality schools are even more stratified by economic position and geography, which are aggravated by arbitrary or discriminatory admissions processes.

Charter Schools

Long the darling of centrist Democrats, the promotion of charters as a market-driven solution has been bipartisan; from Silicon Valley-branded online academies to evangelical, biblically inspired kindergartens, charters have been praised by market fundamentalists on the left and right. But Carol Burris, a veteran educator and head of the Network for Public Education, points out that the erosion of support among conservatives is particularly sharp, despite their tendency to back deregulation-oriented policies.

Some of the negative sentiment may be due to general antipathy toward the Tump administration, But much of the turn, she argues, may simply be that charters have failed to deliver on their lofty promises of innovation and rescuing schools in crisis.

Years of research has shown that charters frequently fail to turn around low-performing schools. Comparative academic analysis of charter and traditional schools suggests that charters perform no better and in many cases do worse compared with traditional neighborhood schools, and often at great public cost. Moreover, a barrage of scandals involving fraud, incompetent management, and labor conflicts between teachers and unions have further dimmed the reputation of entrepreneurial approaches to school reform.

Current Issue

At the NAACP’s hearings on charter schools, a range of stakeholders, including teachers from both traditional schools and charters, along with parents and community activists, reached a rare consensus on the issue: Ideology aside, privatization cannot be seen as a solution in itself, and ensuring every child gets the schooling they deserve requires comprehensive public investment.

In New Orleans, law professor and rights activist Bill Quigley described the city’s massive post-Katrina charter-school system as a systematic imposition of corporate failure over already crumbling schools: “What we have is a very small group of selective schools that are not approachable by most of the people in New Orleans. They are charter schools that are reserved for the wealthy. They are reserved overwhelmingly for white children of the city of New Orleans.”

One Detroit substitute teacher recounted her experience with a district filled with charters but lacking basic resources—the district where DeVos led the privatization movement as a hard-right corporate philanthropist:

Over half of the biology textbooks are tore [sic] up. So I’m using my own resources out of my own pocket, like many of the dedicated educators for this district…. I teach the young people to aim higher than just a career as a basketball player. I want to see more investment in our young people.

“When you have schools that are run by private corps…you lose your voice,” Burris says. Although policy-making for local schools through conventional agencies is often deeply dysfunctional, “there’s a level of accountability with a school board, at least.” When traditional public schools founder, “Even if it were controlled by the mayor, at least there was a governmental body to which they could go and seek redress and even vote them out of office.” After decades of neoliberal reforms, Burris adds, people are recognizing again “that idea of community involvement, community empowerment, at a time when everybody feels alienated from government.”

Under a reactionary education regime, activists argue that more charters pose unsustainable risks for communities struggling against segregation. The promise of desegregation has been betrayed with structural disinvestment from public education in poor communities of color. Yesterday’s Jim Crow is rebranded, with promises of test score gains or free laptops, as meritocracy premised on economic segregation.

“Rather than say we need to get serious about dealing with…racially isolated neighborhoods, insufficient resources going to the schools that need it the most,” Burris says, siphoning education into corporate hands sends a message: “We can’t fix it, so we’re going to just create all of these alternatives. And kids and parents, you scramble, and see if you can get a place in them, and that’s going to solve the problem…. It doesn’t.”

As a cornerstone of the civil-rights struggle, school desegregation was about socializing a public good. Today the privatization of schools is squandering our communities’ most promising public resource, and letting precious minds go to waste.

Problem we're doing is that we're allowing these shitty charters to flood our system. Now, we can't get rid of charter schools. Just not gonna happen.

But we can build our own network of charters that emphasize learning through gaming. That actually will create a system that teaches critical thinking and analytical mindset vice the current Prussian model of the DOE.

If you can't beat them, don't join them; out-strategize them.

Come on, y'all....

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Walter Pewensays:

August 27, 2017 at 10:45 am

Look at New Orleans as the private sector essentially acting as scavengers. The spiritual indicators are sure there. Come into the city where many died and begin to feed. There will always be something to feed upon, so why not in a place where there is a clear cut. Have at it "boys." I've spoken with at least one person whose daughter went down there from Cal to teach. It is reportedly a disaster, still. Just for different reasons.

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Walter Pewensays:

August 26, 2017 at 12:06 am

Alan Backman (below) is bald face lying about "charters in urban areas providing significantly better education." He is lying. Again. Where and how he got his figures from a study "done by the Obama administration" should be taken to task. Do the reading. Liar.

(1)(0)

William J Mac Beansays:

August 25, 2017 at 1:18 pm

"Emptiness at the center?"
Naw; it's all in trump's head, that vast void between his ears, devoid of anything.

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Lisa Augsays:

August 25, 2017 at 11:19 am

Charters are about to hit Kentucky, thanks to our repug legislature and trump-ass-kisser governor.

Thank you, NAACP, for taking the lead in this fight, and thank you Michelle Chen for this article.

If this is an example of the kind of reporting and writing done by "union shills," I say the Nation needs more "union shills."

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Clark M Shanahansays:

August 25, 2017 at 1:27 pm

Lisa,
you might like this Democracy Now's interview with Nancy MacLean.
Seems that the Right's move for smaller gov started as a reaction to Brown vs Board of Ed's finding that separate but equal didn't pass muster,
Milton Friedman was promoting school vouchers in the late 50's.

Anyone still worried about unions must have quit paying attention a long effing time ago.
Chicago's Karen Louis is one of our finest Americans.
She has to deal with a quasi-apartheid system now operated by Rahmbo (who sends his very special offspring to private schools).
Alan must a been one of those "slam-dunk", "three months, we're out of Iraq" guys.

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Lisa Augsays:

August 25, 2017 at 11:23 am

oooh, nicely done shilling for corporatization and the transfer of public assets to private hands. Of course private charters don't provide "choice" to non-white students or anyone who is not a member of the white supremacist club.

Charters are nothing but a machine to suck tax dollars away from the public purse and into the pockets of already rich motherfuckers.

The accompanying segregation of non-white and poor students into crumbling, failing schools is just a bonus.

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Alan Backmansays:

August 25, 2017 at 10:49 am

Chen is a union shill. Charters simply provide poor families with the same choice that upper middle class and rich families have in sending their kids to private school or moving to wealthy districts. Chen calls for additional public investment - but we've tripled spending on K-12 education since 1970 (even accounting for inflation) from $55k to $165k - yet with no improvement in academic performance. She lauds school boards, yet these boards are often beholden to the unions who fund much of their campaigns.
http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2014/10/national_teachers_unions_pouri.html
A number of gold standard studies (including one commissioned by the Obama admin) found that charters provide significantly better education for urban kids than district schools.
What's going on here is very simple. For 50 years, teachers unions have owned a monopoly on tax dollars. And when anyone questioned performance, they would simply offer the excuse that poor and minority kids can't learn. But charters like KIPP and Success have shown that family income is not an insurmountable disadvantage. They can do better . And that's why 30,000 families have chosen to leave the district schools in Philly and twice that in Chicago.
It's time for the teachers unions to wake up and acknowledge their responsibility to effectively teach kids - rich AND poor. And to accept being measured and rewarded for positive results and penalized for negative results. The education of our children is more important than a teachers pension and summer vacation.

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Richard Phelpssays:

August 25, 2017 at 12:54 pm

I can't believe you are a real Nation reader! There are problems with public schools, just like the ACA, and most thing when profit comes first, ( dumping coal waste in rivers) and you don't fix them by turning them over to theocracy worshipers, like Devos, to indoctrinate children to believe the unbelievable, or profiteers like the insurance companies, just like you don't cure the problems with health care by knocking 20,000,000 people off of coverage.

Take some time to study Scandinavian schools and see what can be done when it is a societal priority. In the USA the 1% and their administrators all send their kids to private or church schools. So they don't push for public education.

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Jon Oconnellsays:

August 24, 2017 at 8:10 pm

Had a chat with neighbor Mom as she had a few minutes before picking up her kids at the charter school. I asked, No school buses?. No, no buses. I what about parents w/o transportation or time to do the pick up. She said that's part of the plan.